War and Peace

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War and Peace, epic historical novel by Leo Tolstoy, originally published as Voyna i mir in 1865–69. This panoramic study of early 19th-century Russian society, noted for its mastery of realistic detail and variety of psychological analysis, is generally regarded as one of the world’s greatest novels. It has been widely adapted for the stage, film, and television. Among the most notable film versions is that directed by Sergey Bondarchuk, which won an Academy Award in 1968.

War and Peace is primarily concerned with the histories of five aristocratic families—particularly the Bezukhovs, the Bolkonskys, and the Rostovs—the members of which are portrayed against a vivid background of Russian social life during the war against Napoleon (1805–14). Tolstoy uses their individual stories to portray Russia on the brink of an apocalyptic conflict with Napoleon’s France. Events swiftly move the central characters toward this inevitable confrontation. No other writer surpasses Tolstoy in the scale of his epic vision, which encompasses the mood of whole cities, the movement of armies, and the sense of foreboding afflicting an entire society. The skirmishes and battles are represented with astonishing immediacy, all crafted from interlinked individual perspectives. The interconnected nature of the personal and the political, and of the intimate and the epic, are masterfully explored. As Tolstoy examines his characters’ emotional reactions to the rapidly changing circumstances in which they find themselves, he uses them to represent Russian society’s responses to the demands of both war and peace.

The theme of war, however, is subordinate to the story of family life, which involves Tolstoy’s optimistic belief in the life-affirming pattern of human existence. The heroine, Natasha Rostova, for example, reaches her greatest fulfillment through her marriage to Pierre Bezukhov and through motherhood. The novel also sets forth a theory of history, concluding that there is a minimum of free choice; all is ruled by an inexorable historical determinism.

War and Peace is one of those few texts—James Joyce’s Ulysses is another—that are too often read as some kind of endurance test or rite of passage, only to be either abandoned halfway or displayed as a shelf-bound trophy, never to be touched again. It is indeed very long, but it is a novel that abundantly repays close attention and re-reading. Like the movies of Andrei Tarkovsky, who was greatly influenced by Tolstoy, once you enter into his Russia, you will not want to leave: and in this sense, the length of the text becomes a virtue, since there is simply more of it to read. Tolstoy may be unjustly famed for his ability to digress, but to compromise the unity of the full novel for an abridged version of the text is to undermine the reading experience.

For a discussion of War and Peace in the context of Tolstoy’s life and work, see Leo Tolstoy: The period of the great novels (1863–77).

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...unstable characters and dramatic scenes. While Dostoyevsky delves into the psychology of men and women at the edge, Tolstoy’s novels treat the everyday existence of average people. In both War and Peace (1865–69) and Anna Karenina (1875–77), Tolstoy draws beautifully nuanced portraits filled with deep psychological and sociological insight.

...the drama nor the film—can match the resources of the novel when the artistic task is to bring to immediate, sensuous, passionate life the somewhat impersonal materials of the historian. War and Peace is the great triumphant example of the panoramic study of a whole society—that of early 19th-century Russia—which enlightens as the historian enlightens and yet also...

...or conceived of as afflicting humanity as a whole. The idea is not new—in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars it was articulated, for example, by Tolstoy in the concluding chapter of War and Peace (1865–69). In the second half of the 20th century it gained new currency in peace research, a contemporary form of theorizing that combines analysis of the origins of warfare...